Julius Popp at Kemper

Wow. It’s been a long time since I walked into a gallery and just stood there looking in awe. What’s not exactly clear by the photo is that Popp has designed a water-dropping system that “prints” words, like a dot-matrix computer printer, in falling water. Allow me to repeat that: falling drops of water.

You hear the sound all over the museum of the water dropping — and that might be novel enough —but it’s hard to not drop your mouth when you start reading the water. This is no trick: a spectacle of engineering drops the water precisely as clear as the photo above. Breathtaking.

The words themselves are the most commonly used words on the internet, and they are arranged in no specific order. Why on earth would an artist labor so intensely to make such a beautiful and innovative engineering feat then use it to drive such a bland concept?

If you have nothing to say then quote a poet, politician or a manifesto you agree with. With this technology, one could easily create an animation, or possibly even a video image (perhaps impossible). The unused possibilities are as engaging as the craft behind the artwork.

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This was already patented in 1981 using a circuit board and valves by Professor Stephan Pevnick in Milwaukee. I guess he should have gotten the ingenuity award instead of Popp seing it came out 25 years before his.